Pa. exhumation ends Wash. family's long search

Liz Adams says she doesn't know much about what happened to her brother after he left home in Washington state 18 years ago, but she does know that "he's not lost anymore."

The remains of John Leonard Adams were exhumed Monday from a potter's field in Harrisburg.

Liz Adams said her brother was struggling with schizophrenia when he disappeared in 1993. He was eventually identified through fingerprints as an unknown man who had died after being struck by a train in central Pennsylvania in 2001.

"I actually do believe that souls survive," Liz Adams said at a news conference Tuesday, "and I was afraid that my brother, however he is surviving, felt abandoned and felt discarded."

She said, "To find him, to be able to bring him home, means everything to me, that he's not lost anymore."

Adams was the last person to be buried in the cemetery before the Dauphin County coroner began cremating unidentified bodies. WGAL-TV reported that authorities used a radar device to locate his grave.

Liz Adams plans to return her brother's body to the Seattle area for reburial.